Portugal Telecom

About: Portugal Telecom is a company organization based out in Lisbon, Portugal. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Quality of service & WiMAX. The organization has 144 authors who have published 230 publications receiving 2686 citations.

EASE: EPC as a service to ease mobile core network deployment over cloud

Abstract: The objective of this article is to demonstrate the feasibility of on-demand creation of cloud-based elastic mobile core networks, along with their lifecycle management. For this purpose the article describes the key elements to realize the architectural vision of EPC as a Service, an implementation option of the Evolved Packet Core, as specified by 3GPP, which can be deployed in cloud environments. To meet several challenging requirements associated with the implementation of EPC over a cloud infrastructure and providing it "as a Service," this article presents a number of different options, each with different characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages. A thorough analysis comparing the different implementation options is also presented.

An IP-based QoS architecture for 4G operator scenarios

Abstract: This article describes a global QoS architecture for multimedia traffic in mobile heterogeneous environments. This architecture supports both multiple access networks and multiple service provider scenarios. The architecture is able to provide QoS per user and per service, implementing the notion of a user profile associated network management in the case of heterogeneous and mobile network access is presented based on cooperative association between QoS brokers and authentication, authorization, accounting, and charging systems. The overall exchange of messages is exemplified for the case of a field test with specific optimizations for voice traffic.

Toward a telco cloud environment for service functions

Abstract: Deploying service functions, SFs, is an essential action for a network provider. However, the action of creating, modifying and removing network SFs is traditionally very costly in time and effort, requiring the acquisition and placement of specialized hardware devices and their interconnection. Fortunately, the emergence of concepts like cloud computing, SDN, and ultimately NFV is expected to raise new possibilities for the management of SFs with a positive impact in terms of agility and cost. From a telco viewpoint these concepts can help to both reduce OPEX and open the door to new business opportunities. In this article, we identify how teleos can benefit from the abovementioned paradigms, and explore some of the aspects that still need to be addressed in the NFV domain. We focus on two major aspects: enabling telco infrastructures to adopt this new paradigm, and orchestrating and managing SFs toward telco-ready cloud infrastructures. The technologies we describe enable a telco to deploy and manage SFs in a distributed cloud infrastructure. In this context, the Cloud4NFV platform is presented. Special attention is given to the way SFs are modeled toward cloud infrastructure resources. In addition, we explore the ability to perform service function chaining as one of the fundamental features in the composition of SFs. Finally, we describe a proof of concept that demonstrates how a telco can benefit from the described technologies.

T-NOVA: A marketplace for virtualized network functions

Abstract: Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a concept, which has attracted significant attention as a promising approach towards the virtualization/“softwarisation” of network infrastructures. With the aim of promoting NFV, this paper outlines an integrated architecture, designed and developed within the context of the EU FP7 T-NOVA project, which allows network operators not only to deploy virtualized Network Functions (NFs) for their own needs, but also to offer them to their customers, as value-added services (Network Functions as-a-Service, NFaaS). Virtual network appliances (gateways, proxies, firewalls, transcoders, analyzers etc.) can be provided on-demand as-a-Service, eliminating the need to acquire, install and maintain specialized hardware at customers' premises. A “NFV Marketplace” is also introduced, where network services and functions created by a variety of developers can be published, acquired and instantiated on-demand.

TwitterEcho: a distributed focused crawler to support open research with twitter data

Abstract: Modern social network analysis relies on vast quantities of data to infer new knowledge about human relations and communication. In this paper we describe TwitterEcho, an open source Twitter crawler for supporting this kind of research, which is characterized by a modular distributed architecture. Our crawler enables researchers to continuously collect data from particular user communities, while respecting Twitter's imposed limits. We present the core modules of the crawling server, some of which were specifically designed to focus the crawl on the Portuguese Twittosphere. Additional modules can be easily implemented, thus changing the focus to a different community. Our evaluation of the system shows high crawling performance and coverage.